Much debate has gone into the use of a strangers stray wireless signal. WEP is a clear signal that networks are private but how do you indicate that a network can be freely accessed? They forgot to add that flag to the protocol.

iStumbler can be configured to prefer access points with ssid's ending in '.public', for example 'puma.public' in most of the screen shots (Puma is my G4 Powerbook).

To declare your access point publicly accessible just add .public to your current ssid. People using iStumbler will automatically prefer your network, and others will see it on their list of choices.

Please adhere to the following standards if you do declare your network public:

• don't captive portal the user unless you really need to
  (if you must, use DNS redirects to HTML over HTTP on port 80)
• don't monitor traffic more than necessary to collect statistics
  (i.e. sniffing to count packets and monitor traffic levels is fine but no stream reassembly or logging)
• port and network scanning should be lightly tolerated
• get a good dsl provider which permits bandwidth sharing

Copyright (c) 02003, Alf Watt (alf@istumbler.net). All rights
reserved. Redistribution and use permitted under BSD License
in license.txt.